Failed State - An Enabling Term to Meddle

When any country exists in a manner that is not in conformity with your own peculiar notions, the easiest way is to barns it a failed state. We tend to call any country a failed state without considering the historic, social, cultural and parameters that might help it govern. There are countries that might be deemed to be backward, simply because the do not follow sheep-wise the established mores of Western Democratic system. And branding a country as a failed state is the first step to enslave it- politically, economically and culturally.The term itself was coined by two men, Gerald Helman and Steven Ratner, both employees of the US State Department in 1992. In an article appearing in Foreign Policy (which also hosts the dubious index, that has since been renamed the Fragile States Index), the duo argued that new countries emerging on the world’s map were incapable of functioning or sustaining themselves as members of the international community. What these weak countries (which, it was implied, were near-delusional in imagining themselves as functioning equally in the international realm) needed was the ‘guardianship’ of the Western world. This, in turn, would ensure the ‘survivability’ of these poor hapless countries. This was the white man's burden- ridiculous for some, useful for the west who found these failed states an excellent market. In simple terms, the idea of state failure itself was premised on the assumption that weak or new states should allow and welcome inter meddling from Western overlords whose ‘guardianship’ was really something to be grateful for. Not surprisingly, in the years hence, the term has become a mainstay of justifying interventions and inter meddling via the ‘guardian’ countries themselves or international institutions whose hold over global economics permits them similar licence. It is common to brand countries like Pakistan a failed state. But is it really so? The familiar questions often raised in Pakistan’s dark times: is the state failing, has it failed, will it fail? These are all questions that have appeared in ink in Pakistani newspapers, fallen from the lips of new analysts, been scattered around by politicians. A centerpiece in the scientific analysis of governance, a sense of gravity, is invested in the idea; and, consequently, ‘state failure’ is imagined as an objective standard against which existing inadequacies can be tabulated. Looking at the chaos of Pakistani politics — the inveterate corruption, the endemic nepotism, the lack of oversight and objectivity — the prospect of standards, especially objective ones, gleams and glistens. In this climate of developing-nation despair, therefore, the term “failed” state has been embraced. But tell me which country has not its own brand of venality, corruption and nepotism. Then why brand Pakistan to be so? Not that I am an advocate of this nepotism, but let us not forget that the ethos of Pakistan are submission to feudal lords and religion. Foreign commentators, many of whom make their living on their expertise on Pakistan’s unraveling, have offered their own affirmations. Writing in 2012, following the immediate release of the Failed States Index 2012, Robert Kaplan — the chief geopolitical strategist for Stratfor — dictatorially declared: “Perversity characterizes Pakistan.” Many of his ilk have happily followed suit, heaping all sorts negative terms, each supposedly attached to the pristine numerical objectivity of the ‘failed states measure’. The new colonialism, like the old, presents the shadows of intervention as weightless. As it turns out, the term “failed state” is a hoax designed precisely to capitalize on the insecurities of struggling sovereignties like Pakistan. In an article published in The Guardian newspaper over a year ago, commentator Elliott Ross exposed both the term’s origins and the nefarious intentions for whose fulfillment it was coined. The term and the Failed States Index which accompanies it is the child of a man named J.J. Messner, a former lobbyist for the private military industry. Not only does Mr Messner not disclose this inconvenient fact about his past employment history, he also refuses to release any of the raw data that goes behind the index that he publishes. Despite this, many political scientists who are usually quite vigilant about trawling through each other’s data to verify claims have accepted the presence of the index in their midst. An attached plethora of jargon has emerged to support and affirm the concept, which is now alloyed with partners such as ‘ungoverned spaces’. All of them are geared towards the central purpose of defining countries in the developing world as crucially, inherently and ultimately lacking. The moral underpinning of this framing is that imperial overreach is not something dirty and unwarranted, colonial and corrupt, but necessary, even benevolent. The intervening states are grandfathering, helping along, assisting, and aiding. They are not meddling, provoking, or engaging in self-interested puppetry geared towards accomplishing their own strategic interests, positioning their pawns for their own proxy wars. Words and typologies determine the way we see the world and our own position in it. The dominance of the jargon of state ‘failure’ means not simply the lens of the world averted from the moral wrongs that emit from intermeddling but also Pakistan’s own image of itself. Poised against the idea that Pakistan is a ‘failed’ country, the definition of nationalism or its attached patriotism becomes in turn equally deluded. If the world heaps the vacuous term ‘failure’ in order to whitewash the strategic intermeddling of the more powerful on our borders, those opposing it imagine global isolation as a response. In this oppositional game, opposing the vocabulary of failure seems to require, in turn, a denial of all inadequacies, an imagined Utopian purification all poised on a turning away from the world. The cumulative result is a double distortion, where actual problems are hidden away under the dictates of political gloss from within countries or from their would-be overlords without. In studying international politics and global demarcations, those who are or would be analysts of Pakistan’s condition, or of the post-colonial quandaries and infrastructural inadequacies of any developing country, must be wary of the vocabulary of development and global benevolence. In the proliferation of glib terms like ‘failure’ and ‘rentier’ and ‘ungovernability’ are the mis-characterizations and deceptions of the new colonialism. Like the old, it presents the shadows of intervention as weightless and the obligations of aid as never, ever, nefarious. The arrangement of data, the selection of criterion, and the ranking of the always-wanting must, because of this, be open to epistemology questioning. The idea of the ‘failed’ state is a fiction; digging out from its wreckage of self hood and sovereignty requires not its discounting, but a double challenge that goes beyond both the incorrect characterizations of others and the real flaws we know to be our own. It is an instrument to intervene posing as a benevolent uncle with an implicit desire to rob. We need to stop being impacted by such motivated terms

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